Lucius — Gone Insane

A live stop-motion film using people, prosthetics, and 3,000 still photographs. “Gone Insane” is a track from Lucius’ latest album Good Grief

Art Direction, Motion Graphics

A live Stop-Motion film using people, prosthetics, and 3,000 still photographs. “Gone Insane” is a track from Lucius’ latest album Good Grief

Lucius's Jess Wolfe: "The video was inspired by a dream I had... Similar to a sequence in The Outer Limits Television show (as first seen in a short snippet of Mrs. Doubtfire). In short, Holly was sitting across from me moving my face, as if it were clay. The idea of perception and illusion and perspective, dysmorphia... All driving me a bit crazy. She took that concept and added to it... a mannequin, a spinning room, and thousands of photographs later with the incredible work of Nathan and Katie Johnson, our vision came to life."

When Jess first told me about her dream, I was immediately hooked and I started racking my brain for a way we could bring it to life in a hand-made way without CGI. The idea I proposed was kind of ridiculous, because nobody does extended music video shoots like this anymore. It basically turned out to be a month-long project that included 20 hours in a makeup chair and 4 grueling days in front of the stop-motion rig. We worked with an incredible special effects makeup artist named Jim Ojala to sculpt all the different facial distortions, and then Jess and Holly faced off for perhaps the most exhausting video of their careers.

In the end, we used a combination of stop-motion, go-motion, and intervalometric photography to capture everything. I’ve worked with stop-motion before, and I was really excited about combining that approach with real people in order to capture a living, breathing performance. We slowed the song down by about 600% and had the camera firing off frames at set intervals in order to capture the stuttery lip-sync. All told, we shot more than 20,000 photographs, which were eventually edited down to the final 3,000 images you see in the film.